Whammy Bar

Whammy Bar
by The Auckland Psychogeographer

In this building’s dim memory, St Kevin’s Arcade was home to smart boutiques, gardening stores and bicycle repairmen, milliners and leatherworkers and haberdashers and apparel outfitters. They flourished all along Karangahape Road and onto Symonds Street, before the war. Today the neighbourhood still has fleeting connection to the manufacture of clothing, but the Arcade itself is by and large devoted to hospitality businesses, with a smattering of retail and offices. One space that must have at some point surely been a dingy tailor’s workshop - with only a few glass ceiling tiles for windows - is today the Whammy Bar music venue, a long-running favourite for independent acts and low budget touring bands. It’s bleak, dark, airless, oppressive. Few commercial premises or clothing factories would entertain operating in this underground space today. But musicians will!

Once known as Calibre - a multi-room dance music venue, the space was repurposed by the next-door Wine Cellar, and by the early 2000’s the space was constantly featuring indie scene artists too big for the Cellar. Spun-off into new ownership in recent years, the Whammy has seen significant sound-proofing, equipment upgrades and some reworking of the spaces (although it remains largely similar in layout), overseen by a crew of bookers, sound engineers and musicians. As a non-corporate venue, directed with a conscious, safe-space / anarchist community spirit, the Whammy Bar has the flexibility and aesthetic to host everything from mid-level local artists, reggae soundsystems, touring Japanese psychedelic legends, nights of studenty abandon, and an ongoing parade of punk, metal, noise and beyond.

It ain’t pretty, sure - there’s a huge pillar in the middle of the stage, the less said about the bathrooms the better, and the bar itself is disconcertingly high for some reason - but hey, it’s a dive bar. It’s a black box. You pays your money, you take your choice, and every weekend the Whammy churns out the energetic, sweaty, unexpected electricity of contemporary live music.

With only a handful of dedicated venues left in the city - and really none like this one - the Whammy Bar team are doing vital work, and indeed have recently been a crucial part of spearheading the post-Covid 19, Save Our Venues campaign. Their own rescue package fundraiser attracted $50,000 in just eight hours.

Image Credits: The Auckland Psychogeographer